For a songbird, learning a new song is akin to a child learning a new language. Zebra finches approach this challenge step by step, and even make a detour in the process – by taking song syllables that they already know and adapting them to the syllables that they have to learn. During this learning phase, the syllable sequence often gets mixed up. The birds then arrange the newly-learned syllables into the correct order in the next learning phase. Researchers led by Richard Hahnloser, a professor at the Institute of Neuroinformatics run by ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, have reported these findings in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications.